


Staying Human

by thevoiceoflightcity



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Agender Character, Alien Biology, Angst, Dr Nyarlathotep, Gen, Nonbinary Character, Time Lord Victorious, Time Lords Are Aliens, Trans Character, and it is so so close to breaking, ey is so close to saying, fuck it let the world burn, guardingdark does this better than i do go read their fic, have i mentioned the dr is terrifying and i love them so much, sort of, there's this paper-thin barrier between em and the valeyard, to stop people from freaking out, who goes around in a perception filter/flesh puppet thing, yeah the doctor's an lovecraftian Old One reloomed as a higher-dimensional alien
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-14
Updated: 2016-08-14
Packaged: 2018-08-08 19:14:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7769803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thevoiceoflightcity/pseuds/thevoiceoflightcity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s somewhere around the third day - it’s ridiculous how long it takes, really - when ey realizes that there’s nobody there to hold em back. And that makes it simple.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Staying Human

**Author's Note:**

> This has been hanging around in my google docs for a while, under the name 'the one where ey loses it after lots of stabbing.' I regret nothing (I regret everything.) 
> 
> oh, and i'm using ey/eir/emself because 1) the dr is canonically nonbinary (gallifreyan and human standards) and 2) i always feel ridiculous referring to an ancient Lovecraftian lonely monster-god by gendered pronouns anyway

It’s somewhere around the third day when ey remembers that Donna isn’t here. That Martha is long gone. That Rose is happier without em, on the other side of Bad Wolf Bay. 

It’s somewhere around the third day when ey realizes that there’s nobody there to hold em back.

_(and that makes things simple.)_

Ey landed about a week ago, almost immediately got locked up by your standard totalitarian government, almost immediately got rescued by the standard counterpart rebellion. Apparently ey was marked high-priority by both sides because their scanners picked em up as highly psi-sensitive. (Which is true, ey supposes, but _really_ not in the way they thought.)

Ey stayed with the rebellion for a couple days, gave them some pointers - after all, ey’d started more than a few rebellions emself. They were going to stage the grand coup shortly, and ey was going to help them, under the pretense of wanting to get back to the TARDIS in the dungeons where the government had put her. That was a lie, mostly - ey doesn’t need a rebellion to find her. Doesn’t need anything. Helping them was just a game, his latest trick, to keep emself busy. Ey needed to help _somebody._

Ey would have, too. Maybe ey still can. The rebellion hasn’t showed up yet, ey thinks, despite the fact that the attack was scheduled - what, sixteen hours and three minutes ago? Maybe they came and failed, but ey would have at least noticed the probabilities fluctuating, the battle of chances, deciding which side wins.

(ey thinks.)

Ey would have helped, but the enemy caught em. Which happens a lot, really, and so it didn’t disturb em much - getting caught is a normal part of the cycle, like getting sentenced to execution and disappearing right when all the consequences are about to arrive. The usual. Ey just isn’t fazed by white-walled cells and operating tables anymore. And ey was all ready to talk eir way out of it like ey always does when they cut out eir tongue. 

The first day is mostly psychic torture, aside from that small brutality. They bring in a great black machine that focuses on em with a spine-twisting whine, endlessly spawning things like drills that rip into eir head carelessly, tearing rational thought apart. Sooner or later, though, they must figure out that eir psi-shields are too advanced for their machines. That the pain ey’s radiating is only pain. That eir real self is hidden farther down. That doesn’t stop them from trying, but ey remembers eir training well enough to spin the attack back at them, frying the machine about fourteen hours in.

With that option out they proceed to simpler, more primitive violence. Ey catches, vaguely, that they are doing it under a pretense of sincere scientific curiosity - a desire to understand how this new kind of alien works. It’s fairly obvious that this is a lie. 

Now, it is true that when Rassilon reengineered the Gallifreyans after dethroning the hive-queen Pythia, he added a mechanism for controlling pain. A Time Lord has no native reflexes, is not vulnerable to Pavlovian conditioning nor to sense-loss torture. Nothing is automatic or involuntary. Everything can be and is controlled, to the point where they are perfectly capable of stopping their own hearts, in the same way that a human can hold its breath. It is, however, also true that all the mechanism really does is keep eir mind separate from the actual pain itself. To allow em to _think,_ where lesser species would be drowning in too much agony to speak, let alone negotiate. Allow em to remember the past and see the future and accurately judge whether giving in and letting go is worth it. All it does is keep eir thought-processes sharp and functioning impartially, resulting in a strange half-mad condition in which ey is simultaneously screaming in agony and almost _bored_ , nothing for eir vast Time Lord mind to do. 

It is also important to note, at this point, that none of this mean that ey can’t feel the pain.

Ey shuts down three-quarters of the way through the second day. It’s a calculated decision - ey is losing considerable amounts of blood along with everything else, and the best thing to do is to get as close to a healing trance as ey can get under the circumstances. Ey wakes up again, cannot help it, around the time they attempt to to remove one of eir hearts.

 _Well,_ ey thinks, in the cordoned-off part of eir mind where ey is watching emself being ripped apart, _at least they’re not trying drugs._ Ey’s not entirely sure if the torturers are aware it would, in all likelihood, kill em, or if they just prefer physical violence. Really, ey’s rather better off like this than if they were actually trying to be humane about it - human anaesthetic would most definitely kill em. Has killed em before. This, on the other hand, ey might survive, even now. The humans are clever enough that they’re not going to just let em die of trauma. So far, ey could heal everything they’ve done, given a week’s worth of peace in the TARDIS medbay. 

Then they cut deeper, and ey loses emself for a while. 

Ey’s not going to tell them anything, of course. Ey would have thought that’s obvious. It would be a bit anticlimactic to make it through three days of the best torture this side of a chameleon arch only to give up everything. For now, ey stays in the cold clear part of eir head, ignores how small that safe space is getting, and calculates a few billion digits of pi to keep emself busy. (Then moves on to i, when pi gets boring.) 

Ey can’t really see eir captors anymore. That doesn’t matter. Ey’s never been good with faces anyway - why should ey be, ey changes them all the time, and ey can keep track of people by their timeline signatures anyway. Humans look very distinctive a couple of dimensions over, far more than in the three they inhabit really. The human in the corner over there, the ginger one with the scalpel, sounds the bluest ey’s ever seen off _homo sapiens_ if ey leans slightly _kata,_ into what they’d call the sixth dimension. 

And that’s when ey gets it. It’s not an epiphany, not a sudden realization - it shows up slow and deep and dark, like the winds between suns. Ey has no companion to protect. There is no Nyssa or Harry or C’rizz or River or Vicki or Fitz (and that list of names goes on forever, doesn’t it) being threatened, no beautiful human eyes to stare at em in horror. 

There is no reason to stay human, right now. 

_They have gone too far,_ ey could say, but really at this point ey’s too angry and in too much pain to care about the pointless lies ey spins to convince emself ey’s the hero of the story. Ey’s not. Ey doesn’t care. Ey’s _angry._

Ey opens eir ruined eyes and _hisses_ at the humans with a bloody open wound of a mouth, and somewhere along the line the hissing mutates into dissonant vibrations through the ambient timespace and echoes back along directions they have no name for, a howling roar like a de-mat shock wave, shivering away through the space behind the stars. The skin of the universe warps like melted plastic or broken glass, distorted, dislocated. And the broken, bleeding alien whose name isn’t and never has been the Doctor _unfurls._

Ripping out of nowhere, screaming like the spin of the planet beneath your feet, and in your mouth the faint lightning-sharp smell of the oncoming storm. 

The shriek starts rather before ey opens eir mouth, if that is a mouth, and suddenly there are far too many eyes in the room, connected to nothing and coming from nothing. Some of them are dripping tears. Some are just empty sockets. All of them are unmistakably eirs. 

Then there’s another shriek, and then the _world_ snaps outward, this plane of existence starting to disintegrate with the effort of holding a full Time Lord - the Last of the Higher Races - the whirling stormlike thing somehow still half-chained to the operating table.

The four humans in the room pass out from the shockwave about halfway through. All four of them die shortly afterwards. 

A fifth, who was just outside the door at the time, catches the chronal echo and only spends the rest of her life babbling nonsense.

The Doctor stops. Withdraws slightly, pushes emself off the table, quietly slipping various limbs _ana_ out of the restraints. Ey didn’t really have to do that - ey may be confusing and rather frightening, from a human perspective, but ey isn’t so incomprehensible that ey would drive them mad, not without a nasty telepathic projection to round it off. 

No, ey didn’t have to. Ey just felt like it. 

Well. Ey sighs. Ey’s too tired to think right now, to worry about right and wrong. Ey does try to follow the rules of human morality, in general, but sometimes ey just can’t bring emself to _care._ They’re so pointlessly _simple_ , so stupidly black-and-white. No killing, no causing unecessary pain, no letting planets die because nobody you know lives on them. There’s no nuance to it. And the universe doesn’t work like that, ey’s living proof that there’s no such thing as an unbreakable rule. The Laws of humanity are irrelevant; the Laws of Time can be broken, if you’re careful about dodging the Reapers; the Laws of Paradox are so complicated and contradictory that they break themselves all the time.

Ey drags emself into motion, staggers down a corridor, completely ignoring the three-dimensional doors and occasionally walls in eir path, leaving a thin liquid that may or may not be blood and does not belong in this visual spectrum behind. Ey also ignores the various guards that attempt to stop em, treating them much as ey treats the walls. 

(Eir head hurts.)

Ey arrives at the presidential chamber about half an hour later. Mostly respindled, at that point, but not quite, glowing through the puppet-projection like wildfire against the clouds. It’s arguably worse - a horrifically wounded figure stumbling into the palatial room without opening the doors, no eyes and no tongue and limbs bent the wrong way and cuts that seem too deep to survive - but simultaneously ey has so many more than two eyes, so many more than four limbs, filling half the room with sheer presence and changing every time you look at em too long. 

The rebels are in the room too, in the middle of some kind of negotiation with the presidential cabinet. Ey vaguely recognizes the soldier who showed em around the rebel base, staring at ey in abject shock. Ey thinks, but ey can’t bring emself to remember her name. 

The room is utterly silent, except for the whispers of paradoxes embedded in eir timeline leaking into linear sound (and there are a lot of those - a Time War wreaks merry hell on those who fight in it.)

Ey’s too tired to deal with this. Half of ey wants to just burn the president’s court like so much paper - it would be easy, too - and somewhere else a thing with Donna’s voice is telling em to grow up and sort it out. 

_Go home,_ ey says, finally. Speaking Gallifreyan, probably, but it hardly matters; ey’s projecting hard enough that they’ll understand em anyway. 

_Go home. Stop fighting,_ and eir voice in their heads is sick with grief and rage. 

_I’m tired of fighting,_ ey tells them, humming through the room, mostly talking to emself, slipping in and out of proper consciousness. _I’m tired of losing people. When do you stop? When is it too much? When do you stop rebuilding your life again?_ ey stutters. _When do you get to lie down and die?_

 _When does it end,_ ey roars, and ey is fire and ice and guilt so strong it’s unimaginable. 

Ey looks at them for a while, and every person in the room stands stock-still. They’ll never forget it, that look. They’ll tell it to their children and grandchildren and die with those eyes still in their heads, never knowing why. They will never know why. They will never understand. 

Ey blinks, once, and in the silence, ey turns and walks away.


End file.
